Saturday, August 06, 2011

Since the Star Trek universe was re-booted a few years ago all the Trek-continuity is now invalid and erased. Doing this exposes an entire new audience with disposable income to the Star Trek concepts without all the baggage of passe special effects and dated 1960s allegory.

Another benefit of tossing out and virtually ignoring the decades of Trek history allows all the classic stories to be mined and re-imagined for contemporary consumers. Ruthlessly mining the past will create, at the very least, several decades of chapters to the Trek franchise that are familiar (though not overly dismissive) to the aging fan base yet offer the gloss of being new and improved for the current generation.

In whatever media format new Star Trek chapters will be created older aficionados will appreciate the full nudity the original series was not allowed to reveal and updated, awe-inducing special effects applied to re-imagined tales. Those new to Star Trek will recognize that the franchise is self-aware enough to be mocking the product itself and therefore not be embarrassed or think the show is too corny to spend money on tickets.

The classic time-travel episode The City on the Edge of Forever is probably the best choice for an adaptation into a new chapter in the Trek franchise. Imagine what would happen if the the Guardian of Forever had sent a frenzied Doctor McCoy to the New York of 1976 instead of the 1930s?

What if it was David Berkowitz, the infamous Son of Sam serial killer, who spread a reign of fear through mid-1970s New York, and not a doomed hobo who discovered the phaser dropped by McCoy in the alley? What if the Son of Sam used a phaser instead of a pistol in his crimes?

In the original story pacifist Edith Wheeler had to die to prevent a peace movement that would allow the Nazis to take over the world. In the 2011 story a massacre would have to be reversed and more than one innocent would have to perish for the timeline to return to "normal".

Too dark? Not for today's audiences. The rebooted Star Trek is far more sexual, gritty and realistic than the near Utopia envisioned by Gene Roddenberry. Genocide was one of the themes of the 2009 film and millions of people died unseen in throw-away scenes of destruction. So a killer stalking the streets of New York with a terrible weapon that erases people from existence, the drama involved with reversing the events, would not be too far out of the realm of possibility for an updated chapter of the new Star Trek universe.